Ezra Klein takes on Andrew Sullivan on health care and which system, the British or American, provides better results. It is quite a fun read. Here is Andrew Sullivan's view on why the British are more satisfied with their health care services,

Satisfaction is a subjective function of subjective expectations. If
you have the kind of expectations that many Brits have for their
healthcare system, it is not hard to feel satisfied. The Brits are very
happy with their dentists as well. And there is a cultural aspect here
- Brits simply believe suffering is an important part of life,
especially through ill health. Going to the doctor is often viewed as a
moral failure, a sign of weakness. This is a cultural function of
decades of conditioning that success is morally problematic and that
translating that success into better health is morally inexcusable. But
if most Americans with insurance had to live under the NHS for a day,
there would be a revolution. It was one of my first epiphanies about
most Americans: they believe in demanding and expecting the best from
healthcare, not enduring and surviving the worst, because it is their
collective obligation. Ah, I thought. This is how free people think and
act. Which, for much of the left, is, of course, the problem.

Then we could ask the question: Do the Brits seems to be in worse
health? Do they have a health care system that delivers worse outcomes?
The answer to both is no. In the case of ill health, they're actually
in much better health than their American counterparts,
though that's a function of lifestyle more than hospital choice. And in
the case of health outcomes, it sort of depends. You're probably better
off getting your breast cancer treated in America and getting your
diabetes treated in Britain. In the aggregate, however, the evidence is
fairly clear that the British are better off. Health researchers look
at a measure called “amenable mortality,” which refers "to deaths from
certain causes that should not occur in the presence of timely and
effective health care." In other words, deaths that are prevented by
contact with the health care system. If Andrew is right that those
stoic Brits just grit their teeth and bear their illness, this measure
should be much higher in Britain than in the US.

But it's not.
In concert with Andrew's thesis, Britain does indeed have a high rate
of amenable deaths. Just not higher than ours. . . . But either way, the difference between the American and British
health care systems is not that we are enjoying timely and lifesaving
interventions while they are forgoing them.

. . . the correct question is not
whether Americans would want the National Health Service. The question
is whether they'd want the National Health Service and a $4,000 check every year.
10 years under the British health system, and Americans would have an
extra $40,000 per person (more if you account for inflation and
spending growth). That's the choice. The British choose
a more restrictive health care system -- and yes, the word is choose,
they could vote to dismantle it, or fund it differently -- because that
gives them a cheaper health care system. And I'm much less
certain than Andrew that my countrymen have made some sort of explicit
decision to demand the right to pay $4,000 more than the British for
care that is not measurably better. responds,

The Wall Street Journal reports today that health reform is still alive - even as we see the economy worsen. Laura Meckler writes,

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, who is slated to oversee health-care policy
in the Obama administration, is kicking off the effort to pass a
comprehensive health-care plan.
In a speech to be delivered Friday in Denver, Mr. Daschle will say,
"The president-elect made health-care reform one of his top priorities
of his campaign, and I am here to tell you that his commitment to
changing the health-care system remains strong and focused."

Mr. Daschle will emphasize the importance of moving forward even
amid the economic crisis, noting that rising health-care costs put more
pressure on businesses and must be addressed. The speech does not lay
out any specific timetables for action on health care by the Obama
administration.

Mr. Daschle, who Obama transition officials say will be nominated
secretary of Health and Human Services, will suggest that Americans
hold holiday-season house parties to brainstorm over how best to
overhaul the U.S. health-care system. He will promise to drop by one
such party himself, and to take the ideas generated to President-elect
Barack Obama. . . .

Thinkprogress has a short story summarizing the report from Johns Hopkins University that finds no scientific support for claims that abortions cause "psychological distress, or a 'post-abortion syndrome.'" Yahoo News reports further on the study, stating

No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a "post-abortion syndrome," and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

A team at Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and
found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in
long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy
and others.

"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.

"Based on the best available evidence, emotional harm should not be a
factor in abortion policy. If the goal is to help women, program and
policy decisions should not distort science to advance political agendas," added Vignetta Charles, a researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study.

The Associated Press is reporting on a new cell phone feature - warnings about the flu virus. The AP states,

A maker of over-the-counter cold and flu remedies released a program this week for the T-Mobile G1, also known as the "Google phone," that warns the user how many people in an area are sneezing and shaking with winter viruses.

The "Zicam Cold & Flu Companion" will say, for instance, that 8 percent to 14 percent of the people in your ZIP code have respiratory illnesses, representing a "Moderate" risk level. To give germophobes and hypochondriacs even more of a thrill, it also says what symptoms are common, like coughing and sore throat. Matrixx Initiatives Inc., the Arizona company that makes products under the Zicam brand, gets the information on disease levels from Surveillance Data Inc. — which gets its data from polling health care providers and pharmacies. . . .

Google Inc., which created the G1's operating system, launched its own state-by-state Web-based flu tracker recently. It's based on the number of people plugging flu-related searches into Google's search engine.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal's Health Blog ran a short post on the use of YouTube videos to advertise medical devices and challenges to those ads by Prescription Project, an advocacy group backed in part by the Pew Charitable Trust. I must admit in my YouTube searches the term medical device has never been of great interest, however, it must be for some because companies are using YouTube to advertise their products. Jonathon Rockoff reports,

The Prescription Project says YouTube videos for medical devices made by Abbott, Medtronic and Stryker violate federal rules because they don’t contain required warnings and disclosures. And the group wants the FDA to do something about them.

The companies tout the virtues of the devices without also stipulating the risks that patients need to know before deciding whether to use the products, Allan Coukell, the Prescription Project’s director of policy, told the Health Blog. . . .

The Prescription Project urged the FDA, which has warned some drugmakers about Internet ads, to update its advertising rules to specifically apply to the growing role of on-line marketing. . . .

Ezra Klein has a great post on the need to reform residency programs. He writes,

Being a medical resident is bad job. 80-hour workweeks, . . .

But being the patient of a medical resident is arguably worse. A
tired doctor makes mistakes. And mistakes can kill you. Which is why I
have so little patience for the caterwauling around new rules
meant to impose some minimal regulations on how hard residents work.
How minimal? 16-hour workdays. And the next one can start after a five
hour nap period. Of course, this is merely an Institute of Medicine
report making these recommendations, and thus it's not binding, and
won't be enforced. And so patients will die, and medical malpractice
premiums will rise, and doctors will complain, and all so we can keep
this bizarre program that understands apprenticeship as a mixture of
masochism and cost-cutting.

The New York Times' Gardiner Harris reports on the balancing of costs and benefits of drugs in England and impact that has on other countries as all try to cope with the rising drug prices. He writes,

When Bruce Hardy’s kidney cancer
spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from
Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities
refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught. . . .

If
the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European
country other than Britain, Mr. Hardy would most likely get the drug,
although he might have to pay part of the cost. A clinical trial showed
that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000. But
at that price, Mr. Hardy’s life is not worth prolonging, according to a
British government agency, the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that
Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about
$22,750, to save six months of a citizen’s life. British authorities, after a storm of protest, are reconsidering their decision on the cancer drug and others.

For years, Britain was almost alone in using evidence of
cost-effectiveness to decide what to pay for. But skyrocketing prices
for drugs and medical devices have led a growing number of countries to
ask the hardest of questions: How much is life worth? For many, NICE
has the answer. Top health officials in Austria, Brazil,
Colombia and Thailand said in interviews that NICE now strongly
influences their policies. “All the middle-income countries — in
Eastern Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and all over
Asia — are aware of NICE and are thinking about setting up something
similar,” said Dr. Andreas Seiter, a senior health specialist at the World Bank.

An editorial in today's Washington Post discusses the author's years in a wheelchair and the freedom it has provided him. Gary Presley writes,

This month I began my 50th year of riding a wheelchair through life. In
case you're wondering, everything is all right down here. That's what I found myself thinking recently as I sailed through a
shopping mall. "Look, Mikey! It's magic!" a tiny girl exclaimed to an
even tinier boy as she spotted me. It was a reminder that most of the
creatures I greet at eye level are either small children or large dogs,
two of the better examples of God's work.

What that little girl believed about my power wheelchair was true
for her and true for me. It is a magical thing. This one, my seventh, I
call Little Red. She is a sturdy tool, very different from the fragile
roll-about I came home with from the rehabilitation center five decades
ago, having been left nearly quadriplegic by polio. Little Red is 10
years old, chipped and nicked and bent, but so powerful, so reliable,
that the phrase "confined to a wheelchair" is not only demeaning but
inaccurate. The wheelchair is freedom. . . .

Yes, everything is all right down here, "boob-high to the world," as
my wife calls the place I occupy. Of course, like almost everyone else,
I ache in spots I didn't 20 or 30 years ago, and I'm always a little
short of money. But I have no reason to complain. I find the world
growing a little friendlier each day. Architects and builders are
talking about universal design, a concept that could turn a visit to a
friend's house into something other than a ramp-toting expedition. President Bush
signed the ADA Amendments Act, which clarifies and broadens the
definition of disability to better protect people with disabilities
from employment discrimination. We're making headway in corporate
America, in entertainment and in politics: more visible and accepted, a
few more of us productively employed. . . .

The LA Times has a write-up today about the Bush administrations proposed conscience rule and its breadth. David Savage explains,

The outgoing Bush administration is
planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting
medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare
workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally
objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial
insemination and birth control.

For
more than 30 years, federal law has dictated that doctors and nurses
may refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further by
making clear that healthcare workers also may refuse to provide information or advice to patients who might want an abortion. It also seeks to cover more employees. For
example, in addition to a surgeon and a nurse in an operating room, the
rule would extend to "an employee whose task it is to clean the
instruments," the draft rule said.

The "conscience" rule could set the stage for an abortion controversy in the early months of Barack Obama's administration. During
the campaign, President-elect Obama sought to find a middle ground on
the issue. He said there is a "moral dimension to abortion" that cannot
be ignored, but he also promised to protect the rights of women who
seek abortion. While the rule could eventually be overturned by
the new administration, the process might open a wound that could take
months of wrangling to close again.

Bob Laszewski and Richard Eskow,
two health policy thinkers who I respect very much, have come to
opposite conclusions on the Baucus plan. Eskow says that the plan shows
the glimmers of an emergent consensus on health reform. Lazewski says
that the plans is so vague on key elements like subsidy levels and the
definition of "affordability" that is shows how little consensus there
is. . . .

One of the Baucus plan's embedded assumptions is that Congress should not define too much.
In this, it's taking a page from the successful passage of the
Massachusetts reforms, which offloaded a series of thorny questions --
including the definition of "affordability" and the specific premium
subsidies -- on the Connector Authority.
And sure enough, Baucus's plan has a variant of the Connector Authority
in the Independent Health Coverage Council (more on that here and here).

National Public Radio had a great overview of how the Massachusetts plan was working yesterday evening. The story focused mainly on the significant shortages of primary care physicians as individuals who previously could not afford to go to the doctor are now going for care and flooding the system with new patients.

DemFromCt, who writes for the Daily Kos blog, provides an update from FamiliesUSA on children's health care now that we are officially in a recession. DemFromCt highlights various news, mostly bad, from the FamiliesUSA study,

The
five states with the largest number of uninsured children are Texas,
California, Florida, New York, and Georgia. Together, the uninsured
children in these five states account for nearly half of all uninsured
children in the country (48.3 percent).

The five states with
the highest rates of uninsured children are Texas, Florida, New Mexico,
Arizona, and Nevada. More than 15 percent of children in each of these
states are uninsured, compared to a national median of 9.2 percent.

Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Are Picking up the Slack

Between 2006 and 2007, the number of uninsured children declined by 521,000.

The number of children covered by private health coverage declined by 65,000.

The number of children covered in Medicaid and CHIP increased by 954,000.

FamiliesUSA
also found the majority of uninsured children come from working
families with two-parent households, so another myth goes out the
window. This isn't class warfare, this is everyone.

Remember, this is just the beginning. Covering kids through
Medicaid and SCHIP will temporarily help kids (but not adults), and
mask what's really happening as people lose insurance and can't get it
back (that takes at least two years after a recession). When states
start to hurt, eligibility will be cut back and/or new enrollment will
be limited at the state level. . . .

The New York Times has a story about children being tested for which sport they will perform best in due to their genetic make-up. It is rather sad that parents decide to test their children - whatever happened to fun rather than winning. . . The Times reports,

When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able
to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 ½-year-old son,
Noah, she instantly said, Where can I get it and how much does it cost?

“I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole
your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things,
but I still think it’s good to match them with the right activity,” Ms.
Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor
Soccer in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between
juice and potty breaks. “I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration,” she said.

In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics
is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that
aims to predict a child’s natural athletic strengths. The process is
simple. Swab inside the child’s cheek and along the gums to collect DNA
and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than
20,000 in the human genome. The test’s goal is to determine
whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting
or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a
combination of the two. A 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3
and those athletic abilities.

In this era of genetic testing, DNA
is being analyzed to determine predispositions to disease, but experts
raise serious questions about marketing it as a first step in finding a
child’s sports niche, which some parents consider the road to a college
scholarship or a career as a professional athlete.

Atlas
executives acknowledge that their test has limitations but say that it
could provide guidelines for placing youngsters in sports. The company
is focused on testing children from infancy to about 8 years old
because physical tests to gauge future sports performance at that age
are, at best, unreliable. Some experts say ACTN3 testing is in
its infancy and virtually useless. Dr. Theodore Friedmann, the director
of the University of California-San Diego Medical Center’s
interdepartmental gene therapy program, called it “an opportunity to
sell new versions of snake oil.” “This may or may not be quite
that venal, but I would like to see a lot more research done before it
is offered to the general public,” he said. “I don’t deny that these
genes have a role in athletic success, but it’s not that black and
white.”

Dr. Stephen M. Roth, director of the functional genomics laboratory at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health who has studied ACTN3, said he thought the test would become popular. But he had reservations. “The
idea that it will be one or two genes that are contributing to the
Michael Phelpses or the Usain Bolts of the world I think is
shortsighted because it’s much more complex than that,” he said, adding
that athletic performance has been found to be affected by at least 200
genes. . . .

That is my little runner in the picture - I think that he is having a great time and that is all I really care about right now.